As one of the world’s oldest luxury brands, Italian menswear designer Zegna has spent the past century providing the highest level of excellence when it comes to its products and customer experience.
Angelo Zegna
At the highest level of luxury, customers are looking for more than just a product, they want to be part of a lifestyle, and in this case, part of the family. Zegna was founded by Ermenegildo Zegna in 1910 and the brand has since stayed within the Zegna family, spanning four generations. Throughout that time, it has remained unchanged in its desire to provide the finest level of service and the most seamless shopping experience.
As Consumer and Retail Excellence Director, Angelo Zegna is responsible for ensuring this area of the business remains at its highest standard and keeping up with consumer demands as well as developing new technology and innovation to serve clients. The most recent development was the implementation of ZEGNA X, a digital ecosystem and customisation tool that is rewriting the future of the luxury service. After two years of development and testing ZEGNA X now offers a set of tools that will give customers a one-to-one experience with expert style advisors and allow them to create made-to-measure products via a state-of-the-art 3D style configurator that addresses the specific personal requirements of our clients. This will soon be available across all the product offering and offers the highest level of one-to-one service in the luxury industry today.
ZEGNA DUBAI MALL – OASI CASHMERE POP UP FW22
During a recent visit to Dubai for the 2023 Retail Summit we talked exclusively to Angelo Zegna to discover more about this innovative tool, as well as the future of retail at the luxury brand.
Customer expectations are increasingly higher today which has led to Zegna further exploring the bespoke element – how important do you think this element is today and how is it being executed at Zegna with ZEGNA X?
130 years ago, the world’s best garments were made in the United Kingdom and my great-grandfather had a dream to make the best men’s clothing in the world in Italy. His dream became a reality and because of that “Made in Italy” was born. Over the past three generations, many designers have knocked on Zegna’s door to help bring their sketches to life because Zegna has been doing this for three or four generations. It’s almost impossible to deliver a made-to-measure garment that’s made in Italy to Dubai or New York if you’re not a vertically integrated company and that’s why if you look into our archives, you will find beautiful Zegna fabrics made for many luxury brands.
Why am I telling you this story? Well, to achieve that level of customer expectation you need to have craftsmen and manufacturers working for you. We at Zegna are fortunate because we have that backbone within our company. In certain markets, made-to-measure has increased to twenty per cent of our sales and in certain stores, like New York for example, over thirty per cent of our sales are from made-to-measure products which are unheard of in the industry. Zegna is the only luxury brand that offers full made-to-measure, which means actually fully measuring every element of the body and custom fitting the garment in both formal and casual wear.
OASI Zegna
How do you see consumer behaviour today changing and how are customers driven towards more made-to-measure or bespoke services?
For the past six or seven years trends were all about bright colours, flashy colours, and big logos. The pendulum is now swinging towards much more understated sophisticated craftsmanship. And you see that even here in Dubai. When I was here a few years ago it was not like that. Streetwear was much more prominent whereas now we are moving towards a world of everyday luxury, as opposed to fast luxury, and this is the world of Zegna, so we are welcoming it. It’s interesting that when things get a little unstable in the world, people usually go back to a classic, modern and elegant look. In the past, Zegna would try to personalise collections for each market, but we believe this was a mistake which we have now addressed, but the beauty now is that trends are much more global than you realise. Even between China and America for example, the trends are the same. And as a result, we have the same products that are selling well in every country in the world. We have iconic global products, and they appeal to customers wherever they are. During the COVID pandemic, we thought that customers would no longer want to wear suits but now they are in higher demand than we expected. We are selling fewer suits than before the pandemic, but we are selling higher-quality suits. The pandemic also allowed us to ask the question of what the modern gentleman looks like. Because of this today, we use the same way of constructing a jacket, but we have created an incredible new silhouette which is more of an overshirt. This jacket is now two years old but it’s timeless and it will live for the next generation. Every season we introduce a new interpretation of it, but we won’t change the design because we are not fashion, we are luxury.
Tell us about ZEGNA X and how you are planning to roll it out globally.
Zegna targets the top one per cent of customers. For us to succeed with this customer, we need to offer the most customised experience possible. Our clients don’t want to have the stress of a complicated payment or returns or shipment process, they cannot be bothered with that. So, during COVID, we launched a clienteling app. Many brands have done this but the difference between what other brands have done and ZEGNA X is that today 45 per cent of Zegna’s revenue globally is powered by this app. This doesn’t mean we are sending products directly to their homes, but through this app, we are telling the customer to come and meet us for an appointment etc. and it has become a tool of communication. This is the first part of the ZEGNA X digital ecosystem.
The second part is the ZEGNA X configurator which is launching firstly in Milan and will be rolled out globally, and then by 2024 it will also be available on our website, so customers can put together looks from home. Then the third part brings us back to the made-to-measure element which will this month be introduced in Milan and the customer will be able to choose from forty-nine billion combinations. How can a luxury brand with very few SKUs have forty-nine billion options for its customer? The answer is made-to-measure! Thanks to this ability to have the made-to-measure element, we can make it the most extraordinary styling tool that is out there. Effectively what our customers are doing is standing in front of a big touch screen where they can build their own looks which can then be sent through the app, and then three or four weeks later they will be delivered to our customers.
ZEGNA X – 3D STYLING CONFIGURATOR
What challenges do you face to be able to achieve this?
Retail is all about people, so the biggest challenge is changing the mindset of our customer advisors. We have already moved mountains during the COVID pandemic. Before this, we were spoilt because we relied heavily on tourists to shop in our stores. Then when the pandemic happened this all changed, people could no longer travel. But I believe it was a reset moment for the business because it made us wake up and realise the changes.
So, we have spent two years, not only perfecting the app but also changing the mindset of people. We are in the business of building relationships, none of our customers need clothing, they already have clothes, but it’s about making a connection with them and making them feel like part of the brand and the community. This is the biggest challenge, to get people on board with our vision and why this is the right direction for us to take.
What do you do to make sure your retail strategy among all your boutiques around the world is coherent?
There are two points: The first is to create a new function which has precise objectives and ensure that the brand strategy lands in every single store in the market. We call it consumer retail excellence. The second is that at Zegna we say that if we do not measure something it will not happen. With that in mind, we were the first in luxury to deploy the Net Promoter Score. The Net Promotor Score is a very simple method where every Zegna customer in shops around the world will receive an email asking how likely they are to recommend their experience to a friend, ranging from 0 to 10, as well as a few other questions. It is a quick two-minute survey. We collect thousands of responses from customers globally and then based on the rating we score the stores. It’s a customer-centric approach that allows us to understand how the customer feels and shows us where we are getting it wrong. Every Friday afternoon I sit and review every single comment and of course, we have clients who write handwritten letters explaining what went wrong. The reason Zegna is able to retain the best location in The Dubai Mall, the largest mall in the world, is thanks to productivity. Productivity is the index of how much revenue a brand can generate in any given square metre of the store. And this is something we are focusing on more and more.
So NPS (Net Promoter Score) is qualitative, and productivity is quantitative. When the two come together usually there is a strong correlation. The beauty of NPS is that it’s a leading indicator. If NPS is high today, productivity is going to be high tomorrow. Because you’ve done a good job within the community through word of mouth
and the customer experience, these customers will tell others and then the numbers will come.
Tell us about Zegna in The Middle East and what are your expansion plans when it comes to the region.
Last December I toured five countries in the region and the UAE is of course currently our strongest country in The Middle East, but we feel very strongly that in the next five years, Saudi Arabia has a chance of rivalling the UAE, and I was very positively surprised about another market, Egypt.
Zegna has many unique elements. One of these is to be the first of everything. We were the first luxury brand to enter China, the same happened in Egypt. And now the country has become more stable, and everyone is going to Egypt. We are opening our first store in Saudi Arabia early next year. And we plan to open several more stores in the next five years. Gildo my father has said many times that Dubai is the next Hong Kong and I think he is proven to be right! This region is amazing. Every day at Dubai Mall, we have over 30 nationalities shopping in Zegna. It’s a pleasure to watch.
What do you still want to achieve in your role?
There’s so much! A 360 approach between marketing and customer – the opportunities are so big and I want to keep enhancing everything we do and continue raising the bar. We feel that in the next two decades, we can become the purest of brands, but it requires continuous improvement.
You are here at the Retail Summit – how would you assess what you have seen here today?
We are all talking about the same things: Sustainability, the top one per cent, community, and customisation. I would ask how many brands own a national park and have been taking care of a mountain that’s thirty times the size of Central Park in New York, for over 100 years. And then we can see who’s more credible and more committed to sustainability! I think it’s a fair question and we are very committed. We’ve announced that by next year, all our cashmere is going to be fully traceable. This means that customers will know exactly where the cashmere in their garments was bought from, and they will know the full supply chain. You can only share this kind of information if you own your full supply chain. We have our own land in Australia where our sheep graze. So, we go from sheep to shop!
Going back to trends everyone is talking about the same thing, but some brands are better equipped. In my opinion, we are in a very strong position when it comes to sustainability, customisation and the top one per cent – we tick all three boxes – that’s why I’m saying that the opportunities are huge.
If you were to describe Zegna as a brand what can you say?
Oasi Zegna is the home of our values and tradition and this is something we honour to this day. Traditionally Italians focus so much on polishing the product that they forget about telling the story and marketing the product. The French are very good at this and are fantastic storytellers. Doesn’t mean their product is better but they do invest a lot of time in storytelling. For me, the product always comes first.
John Elkann, the Grandson of Gianni Agnelli, who owned Ferrari came to visit us at Zegna and he told us that out of one million businesses, only 44 survive 100 years of business. And the number of businesses that survive 200 years of history is one out of one billion. Without an amazing product, you might make it for five or ten years, but you won’t make it for 100 years. Our family motto is that you never own a piece of Zegna, you are just a guardian to pass it on to the next generation.
What is a valuable lesson you learned from your father that you will share with future generations?
Integrity. Only do what’s right, stick to your values, and don’t over-promise
